


This Heart Within Me

by bluebeholder



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Awkward Romance, F/M, For Science!, Medical Experimentation, No Sex, Restraints, The Calling (Dragon Age), consensual body modification, i cannot stress enough how pleased the subject is with this, very consensual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:53:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26530036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: Facing the Calling, the Warden seeks out the Architect, asking for help to prevent her death. He has the skill to do it, but the Warden will not survive the ordeal unchanged.She doesn't particularly mind.
Relationships: Architect/Female Warden (Dragon Age)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 15





	This Heart Within Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [adrift_me](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adrift_me/gifts).



> Does this count as a crack ship? Is that what I've written here? Have I crossed that line?
> 
> Anyway, enjoy this trip into the Deep Roads!

In her moments of clarity, she catalogues the things she feels.

Stone, cold and dry beneath her back; air, just as cold, but clammier, on her face. Leather restraints, tight enough to hold, soft enough not to chafe, around her wrists; their chains clanking on the stone. The vaulted ceiling, stones old and cracked, all brightly lit with white mage-light. Smells of herbs, of blood and bile, of ozone. The taste of metal in her mouth, from exertion; the taste of leather, from biting down on a strip.

More importantly:

The touch of delicate, sharp claws on her arms and, sometimes, her face. Moving against the light, a silhouette, tall and graceful. A voice, deep, slow, strangely accented, dry and whispering like the skeletons of leaves in autumn.

“It is almost ended. You are almost free.”

How long she has been here, she does not know. There are no days and nights here and, surrounded by sleepless creatures, day and night would have no meaning anyway. Time blends and blurs until sometimes it feels she has been on this table for decades; sometimes as if it’s only minutes. The minutes are the clear ones, when she can think. The decades are the rest, when pain splits her body.

It is worth it, she reminds herself. This will be worth it.

When the Calling came after so many years, after so many lost friends, after the loss of all she held dear, she should have gone into the Deep Roads for the honorable death that was her due. Instead, she fled from that sacred duty. She searched out an old friend, one very nearly forgotten, to beg for aid.

The Architect.

He’d been busy, over those long years. He’d even closed his doors and ignored the terrible years of Corypheus and the Breach, of all that followed with the Veil and the Dread Wolf and the Qunari and…all of it. He had better things to do.

She’d forgotten, until seeing him face to face again, of how strangely she’d felt about him when they met. How, for all his severity and amorality, he’d radiated a sense of compassion for even those he cut to pieces in the name of progress. How he’d spoken longingly of peace and the future, a better future for all. And how he’d treated her well and even tenderly, even during that awkward initial episode of their acquaintance. They’d built something of a rapport, before going their separate ways.

Never attracted to any of her companions, she’d felt at liberty to look at him with another kind of eye, as well. For a being so ancient and tainted, he was reasonably easy on the eyes. And had a voice that, even years after they parted ways, still woke her up in the middle of the night, not frightened but… _wanting_.

Seeing him face to face, she’d learned swiftly that none of this had changed.

“Now I know,” he said, sitting at an empty table with her while she wolfed down a plate of raw meat—seemingly the only thing she could eat anymore, “that the work I performed on my Disciples was but a fraction of what can be done. The ritual of the Grey Wardens is what your Chantry would call, I think, the magic of the maleficar.”

“You think?” she asked, wiping blood from her mouth.

“Were I you, I would not inform them of the matter.”

She laughed. “Tell me more.”

He steepled his fingers, meditative. “I hope you remember my dear Seranni. With her aid, I was able to rescue more of the tainted like her from their fate. Most, now, remain clear-thinking. I have made great progress on the creation of more of my Disciples, using _their_ blood to sever the connection to the Old God. A good thing, considering that after your intervention I no longer had Warden bodies to drain of their blood.”

“Yes, well, I think that’s a good thing.”

“I did not say I resented you for it,” he says. “Indeed, it forced me to greater heights of creativity. Yet, for all the progress, I have reached a dead end. With your aid, I could pass beyond it.”

She sat upright at that and pointed at him. “I came to _you_ for help!”

“And I shall help you,” the Architect said. He held up a placating hand. “I believe that I can save you. I can sever you from the Old God, as I have my Disciples. Yet the toll the process will exact is unknown to me. You are not one of the darkspawn. You are not yet a ghoul, though you draw closer daily to the designation. In the end, your state is closest to…”

“To what?”

He smiled at that, the merest tilt of his lips. “My own.”

“You’ll experiment on me, then.”

He rose to his feet and walked slowly around the table, toward her. “The greatest unknown through all of my work is why I, and I alone, awakened,” he said. “Why was I the only one free of the influence of the Old God? What separated me from the rest? With the solution to that mystery, I would be able to throw wide the doors of knowledge. Processes I can merely enact I would now _understand_.”

She looked up at him, looming over her. Perhaps she should have felt afraid. She didn’t.

“I wish to attempt to recreate the process that produced me, millennia ago,” he said. “The blood of the Grey Wardens flows in your veins. You will be stronger, invested with the same power that I am, but free of the taint, of the Calling. Join me. Help me.”

Strangely, it took no thought at all to accept the offered hand.

And, through the burning haze of pain strapped to this table while the Architect does his work, she has yet to regret her choice.

She can’t hear the Calling anymore.

Pinpointing the moment it ceased is impossible. She merely knows that at some point she opened her eyes and could no longer hear it. No more of that cruel summons, the call to death.

In the sudden silence, she cried.

“Oh,” the Architect said, from off to her left. For once, his serene voice sounded alarmed. “This…is not the usual response.”

She swallowed hard and turned her head to look at him. “You,” she informed him, through a rusty, tear-stained voice, “have never had to _hear_ the Calling. _I_ think it’s natural to cry.”

“The darkspawn,” he said, writing a note in a great book, “become enraged.”

“I’m _not_ a darkspawn,” she objected, “ _or_ a ghoul.”

The Architect rose, came to her side, and carefully—with a clean white handkerchief, the most incongruous item to see in the Deep Roads—dried her face. “No,” he says. “Nor are you, any longer, a human.”

She knows that. Through this whole process, she feels her limbs twisting, elongating, her spine popping and snapping as it lengthens. She screams at the moment the Architect cracks open her chest to get to her heart, her lungs. Soon enough, she no longer feels the need to breathe.

Her blood is thin, and perhaps not entirely her own. There are long hours when the sharp pains of needles sit in her arms, as he drains what he needs of her blood. And then similar pains, as he pours _something_ back into her veins.

When he opens her skull, it knocks her insensate. The grinding of bone, growing into new shapes, snarls in her ears, fills her vision. The shape of her skull is changed.

Magic sears her flesh, pulls at her senses, dizzying and hissing with the Fade. Nightmares lurk at the edges of her closed eyes, but they do not approach. The Architect does not permit it.

Her jaw cracks, unhinges, reforms. Teeth fall out; the Architect carefully, gently, removes them from her mouth. Searing pains fill her mouth as new, razor-sharp teeth grow in. When she bites her tongue, she bleeds.

In her abdomen, pain harsh enough to make her _howl_ and fight the restraints.

“I would not like to risk you becoming a Broodmother,” the Architect says, and she sees his scalpel flash in the light. “I must remove that which would make you one.”

At last, it’s over.

She awakens in a room alone, on a bed marginally more comfortable than the stone table. No restraints, now, and light from lanterns rather than magic. She sits up and sees a room, well-appointed if somewhat ruinous. Dull, heavy tapestries shroud the walls; there is a wooden desk and chair, and the bed, and a mirror.

Slowly, marveling at the lack of aches and pains that have so plagued her with age and a life of combat, she rises. Just looking at her hands, she can see that her skin is pallid now, with veins easily seen. Ever considerate of the details, the Architect gave her a sideless surcoat of red brocade to wear. It has a high collar, lacing all the way down, and the skirt trails on the floor. The arm holes are open from shoulder to hip, and since there is no dress beneath it exposes all the skin of her sides, and leaves her arms bare.

She smiles, feeling sharp teeth against her tongue.

When she goes to the mirror, the vision before her is nothing like she expected.

Taller, now, gracile; thin arms far too long for her frame on shoulders _far_ too narrow. Hands small, but with long, slender fingers, tipped in dark claws. Her legs are, similarly, long, though she can’t see beneath the robe. It pleases her, when she turns and sees that small, curved, dark spikes protrude from all her joints, from her fingers up to her shoulders. She’d always been partial to spiked armor.

The length of her neck remains the same. So do the proportions of her face, save for two dark spikes, one pushing up from each brow. She is entirely hairless, even missing brows and lashes. The rest of her skull is elongated, elegant in shape.

A step at the doorway alerts her that she is not alone. She turns—feeling remarkably fluid—to see the Architect. “You should have been a sculptor.”

“Why else would I have been called the Architect of the Works of Beauty?”

She smiles. “How much time did you spend thinking of my armor?”

“Longer,” he says, “than I care to admit.”

There is an extended pause. She turns to face him again and realizes, to her surprise, that they are nearly of a height now. He watches her, expressionless, but there’s a certain tension about him.

He asks, “Do you…like it?”

As shy, in all his glory as a Magister Sidereal, as a boy who’s offered flowers to a pretty girl.

The absurdity of it could make her laugh, but instead it stills her entirely. “Very much,” she says. “A fitting way to spend the next eternity, I think.”

The Architect smiles, close-lipped, but clearly pleased. “I have not performed art in many years. It was a pleasure to have such a subject.”

“You kept my face the same,” she says, and touches her throat. “ _And_ my voice.”

“To change those would be a crime against nature,” the Architect says, “and though I have committed many such things in my time, this is a line I could not cross.”

And here she is, blushing like a girl who’s accepted flowers from a handsome boy.

“I suppose everything else has changed,” she says, looking down at her hands. “Should I expect a sudden change in morality?”

“No,” the Architect says. “You reached me in time. The taint had not truly changed you. In all ways, the heart within you still remains yours.”

There’s no good answer for that. A question—of whether _his_ heart was changed, when he changed—rises to her lips. Judging by his stillness, he’s waiting for the question.

She doesn’t ask.

“Did it work?” she asks at last. “The replication of your creation, I mean.”

“Perhaps,” the Architect says. “I will have further study on the matter, but progress has indeed been made. And with your blood, I believe that I can make the strides I anticipated.”

“An overwhelming success, all of this,” she says.

The Architect offers a hand. “I would show you our domain,” he says.

It doesn’t escape her. _Our_ domain. The idea of this—controlling a part of the tainted Deep Roads, a place she has always feared, at the side of an Emissary—should horrify her.

She takes his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> “This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.”   
>  \- Albert Camus


End file.
